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Teachers are not fleeing

Published: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 at 6:06 p.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 at 6:06 p.m.

The number of teachers who retired last year was up from the year before.

That has caused some school officials across the state to register concern about the teachers leaving their systems. It has even led some to speculate that more teachers than usual could be leaving because of the new education reforms enacted last spring.

Those reforms restructured the way tenure is awarded to teachers. It also put in a whole new system of evaluating teachers that relies more heavily on student performance.

While there have been some worries among teachers about the new systems being implemented, the numbers do not suggest a large exodus from the teaching field.

“There is not any cause for concern regarding overall attrition of teachers,” state Education Superintendent John White said on Monday. “The idea that the reforms are pushing out top teachers is simply untrue.”

The number of retiring teachers went from 2,598 in the year ending in June 2011 to 3,295 in the year ending in June 2012.

That is a big increase, but there is no hard evidence that the one-year spike can be blamed on the new laws rather than just being a one-year phenomenon.

There is also no reason to think that the increase will necessarily continue this year or into the future.

With that said, though, large deviations one way or the other from the norm bear watching in future years to see if there is a valid connection.

At the same time the retirements were going up, so was new-teacher hiring. The state’s school systems have been able to keep pace with teachers leaving by hiring new teachers to take their places. That creates challenges as well because we lose experience in the process. In the long term, though, it is an inevitable process. And while there is a loss of experience, there is also an influx of new blood into the schools.

There is no easy way for school systems to know from one year to the next exactly how many employees will leave — through retirement or other means. It is a problem that must be faced each year, with some variations from one year to the next.

The statewide retirement numbers might give opponents of reform a platform for their complaints; there is no reason to think that had any effect on the numbers.

It is more important for school officials to concern themselves with creating the best performance among the teachers and students who are part of their systems.

If that part of the equation can be improved — and it is still too soon to know whether that will come about either — the raw number of retirements in one year or another will be just another statistic.

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